Samuel_Tow

It is?

Huh... So it is. No offence, but that's a pretty bad reference to make. The 666 number of the beast is a pretty heavily Christian concept, so to stuff it in a set that's purportedly designed for all Origins seems rather a wrong choice. I realise our development team enjoy little references like that, but couldn't they have picked something less obvious? I admit, I missed it, because I rarely had to look at the numbers on my overpowered Mastermind. I looked at the first entry and that was that. But had I seen the number on the power, it'd have been clearly obvious.

Ugh... Now I'm reminded of Linkara's review of Silent Hill: Dying Inside, specifically with his comparison of the comics' heavy-handed use of contemporary religion (namely, that the code to unlock evil is 666) vs. the games, which when they borrowed from religions at all, went for items so obscure most people didn't catch them as references or inspirations.

Interestingly, the Cold resistance in the Ember Shield is 3.33%.

It's rather more difficult when people start suggesting swapping out less realistic powers for more versions of Burst, because then you have to convince me why my implausible future-gun suddenly lost one of its implausible abilities for more realistic ones.

Arachnos guns are fun and all, but they are NOT the omnigun I had in mind when I made my AR Blaster. I don't want "just a rifle." I want a set with a variety of different gun attacks. Burst, slugs, grenades, fire, rockets...

Speaking of which, I notice you neglected to explain Cryo Freeze Ray and Long Range Missile Rocket. I know they're not technically part of the set, but they use the same gun without redraw.

You'll also note that Arachnos guns have limited to Wolf Spiders and have a total of three gun attacks, with the rest being grenades. To be honest, I'd still rather have a fancy frankengun than a gun which fires bullets in three firing modes and grenades with different fillings.

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As far as fixing Assault Rifle goes, I still maintain that it needs more single-target, which we could find either in Ignite if that were changed, or in Buckshot if that were changed.

Say, how's about this:

Buchshot retains its current spread, but does an extra heavy damage component on the one target you're aiming at, kind of like how Electric Melee -> Thuder Strike does. It probably still won't be very endurance-efficient as a single-target attack, but it should still keep its cone utility. That'd help a long way.

Beefing up Sniper Rifle a little in the absence of Aim would also be a huge boon. Maybe then I can ask for a more powerful sound for it without having people laugh at me.

The post assumes it's an inside joke, which therefore assumes it's intentional. I don't believe it's intentional in the slightest, specifically because you need around 33.2% Schedule B enhancement to turn a 5% damage buff into a 6.66% damage buff. I can't find an exact enhancement that does this, but three +1 DOs come close (6.65%), which could produce this via number rounding because the numbers on ParagonWiki are rounded down to two decimals. I don't have access to Schedule B Inventions numbers (none that I can find, anyway), so I assume one of those could produce a more precise number.

I get the joke, I just don't think it was intentional.

Suppose I want a port of the same ATs across faction? Suppose I've been waiting for years to play villain Blasters or hero Masterminds? What then?

Then why did the base buff of the demon shield say 5% on mine?

The value for the shield is (or should be) 5% resistance. Currently, there is a bug with Real Numbers which causes damage enhancements to show up as boosting resistance (they don't) and boosting damage only as Schedule B when they should be Schedule A (they work correctly, the readout is just wrong). It's likely that your damage slotting is affecting your damage resistance.

Or is that unenhanced?

Well, not quite. It's the human element that makes it personal for me. Maybe it's because I haven't worked the kind of job that would desensitise me to other people like, say, retail or customer support (I do tech for the university here and teach classes), so every time I have to interact with people, it turns into a social experience. The difference is precisely that the system does it for me. There's a mediator doing everything, so I can just put on my blinders and focus on myself and my own actions.

I'm just trying to compare experiences and trying to pin down why I have no problem playing with other people in Battlefield 2142, yet don't seem to want to do it here. I guess in Battlefield, I'm essentially playing by myself and treating the rest of the team as "environment" that I have to around, rather than people I have to work with. Specifically, since neither squad leaders nor commanders ever seem interested in giving orders or getting off their *****.

On the notion of powers, our graphic violence level is a lot like what you'd find in, say, Marvel vs. Capcom. We shoot, cut, blow up and burn each other as a matter of course, but instead of causing disturbing, disfiguring injury, this merely depletes our health bar. Even the weak, helpless and unprotected whose metahuman powers don't include the ability to not be torn apart by high explosives simply take more damage, but suffer no more injury.

And I prefer it that way.

There's been an ever-present problem with lethal weapons and children's cartoons for as long as I can remember, in that children's cartoons will always try to avoid letting wielders of lethal weapons actually use these weapons on other people. Either they'll be unable to use them (why does 90s Fox Wolverine keep getting grabbed by the wrists?), will use them in absurdly non-lethal ways (shoot freezing bullets, melt enemies' weapons away, etc.) or only ever use them on robots or stationary objects. This is because the very real injury these weapons would do would both break the rating and drag the story's theme WAY down into the mud. You can't have a zany swordsman who cuts people's limbs off, after all.

The way City of Heroes does it is ideal, in my eyes. No blood, no gore, no dismemberment, just damage. The more chunky salsa splatter a power would have done, the more damage it does. You may "attempt" to cut off your opponent's head, but you will never succeed. All you'll do is damage him. This allows us to have guns, bombs, flames, lasers, swords, claws, axes, bows, poison, radiation, etc., etc. And all of that without devolving into some constant moral ambiguity about being a good guy yet constantly killing people in gruesome ways or a villain who dismembers people as a living.

I've seen a number of people requesting a minimal age limit lift as a way to facilitate "more villainy," but I will always disagree with this. As I've stated multiple times before, I don't believe that kind of evil is what City of Villains needs to be more appealing to players playing villains. If anything, that's liable to turn off more people than it attracts. City of Villains is evil lite, and for my money, all the better for it.

I meant Dwarf Form in comparison to Human Form. Comparing Dwarf to Nova is obviously going to produce staggering results, but Nova form has more offence than Stone players are typically shooting for, especially Tankers. If anything, Kheldian Human Form offence ought to be roughly comparable to that of Tankers, albeit with more range and probably more AoE.

Anyway, as far as preference goes, I'm actually NOT a fan of this modal design. I mostly play solo, so trading offence for defence just means I'm prolonging the battle, thereby putting myself under fire longer, thereby compromising my defence that much more. Again, for a heavy-tanking Tanker I can see this as a strong build choice, but for a Brute... I don't know. I'm just not a fan.

Please understand I say this with the utmost respect, but do you even listen to yourself? Remember the BotZ change? Remember the AoE caps change? Remember Poison Gas Trap and its proc storm? Remember Instant Healing? Remember Perma Elude/Unstoppable? Rmember MoG? Remember Psychic Shockwave? Remember Domination? Remember Defiance? Remember Hide and its mechanics? Remember Vigilance?

How about dumpster diving? How about Burn herding? How about Dreck farms? How about the numerous Architect exploits, like the Mastermind henchmen bug? How about all the custom farm missions? How about the badge exploits?

They can't get things to work right and they can't find all the exploits in content THEY MAKE THEMSELVES, and you're trying to suggest that they'd instantly and subconsciously KNOW when one out of a thousand submissions is using the wrong AT table and generating high values? Hell, recently Castle himself misspoke about the damage values of Shield Defence Shield Charge. I'm not sure he would have caught the wrong value on a cursory look through a hundred Shield Defence custom user prototypes. And I don't blame the guy - there are too many numbers to remember in the game, which is all the more reason why they can't just KNOW when something is potentially abusive.

And again, just having access to the numbers doesn't mean much. There's no way to procedurally make the software spit out what's overpowered, what's underpowered and what's play not going to work. Somebody has to LOOK at these numbers, understand them and then decide if they're going to work. And, no, you can't assume that most submissions are good and let them go through unless something in them is OBVIOUSLY wrong. ******** will try to pass forward subtly exploitable designs while idiots are going to pass forward subtly unplayable designs that someone has to greenlight BEFORE they get into the game. That's someone who's not going to be getting much else done pretty much ever at all.

And yet even though the Architect is not complex in its usage, people have still managed to break it five ways till Sunday, necessitating patches, fixes, updates, addons, retweaks and whatnot THREE ISSUES after it was introduced. If you want to claim that it's not complex and still people break it and exploit it (and they do), then it ought to stand to reason that the much more complex power design system would be a veritable death trap.

Don't mind if I do!

True, but by the same token you can't simply appoint one as the "better" form of mitigation. Their have their strengths and their weaknesses. They don't have to be interchangeable, true, but they're not THAT different' either.

I wouldn't. And if this happened, I would punch people... Except it wouldn't hurt them.

Seriously, though, this will make Granite Armour practically useless for, I dare say, most people who use it, thereby making Stone Armour in general useless, thereby necessitating another fix to fix this fix. Yes, there are a fair few Tankers who enjoy playing Taunt Bot. More power to them, and I have nothing against this, but devoting an entire powerset to this is not a good idea.

Interestingly, I'd actually agree with integrating Granite Armour as one more shield to be run constantly. THAT would make it unique among T9 powers without a doubt. However, doing that would kill the "modal" nature of the power, as there would be no reason to turn it off. Personally, I don't mind it, but others will undoubtedly protest.

For a Tanker, possibly. For a Brute, I'd struggle to think of a justification. Brutes ARE offence. Trading offence for anything else on a Brute is like a gunslinger trading his sixshooters in for sugar cakes and cotton candy - sure, it feels good, but what are you going to do with those?

Again, I'd actually sooner see the Granite Armour "mode" left on by default by integrating it into the set's regular-running toggles in general. That would shift the "offense vs. defence" paradigm to powerset selection.

Not quite. A Kheldian's melee damage mod is around .85 and ranged is either .8 or .75. Dwarf Form has a melee damage mod of 1.0, which is significantly higher. Yes, it's true the form only has three attacks, one of which is AoE Foot Stomp, but they Can be cycled well enough. Outside of a few specific powers like Incandescent Strike, Kheldians actually deal more damage in Dwarf Form. Or at the very least close to as much.

If Granite Armour WERE like Kheldian Crab form, then few people would complain about Granite Armour. Never forget that Dwarves can also run fast, jump high and teleport naturally.

You'd be surprised.

That's basically the whole thread in two sentences. Well done And I agree completely. One has to make a distinct difference between the kind of villain who would make a dramatic, hateful antagonist to a popular hero and the kind of villain people would actually want to BE (read: play as).

I guess that the kind of villains City of Villains portrays for the most part would indeed make for good antagonists. They still don't make for a very good playing experience, though.

Oh, of course! The Elder Snakes! How didn't I think of that before? That's exactly what I was talking about. Have a low-level enemy group either die down or be defeated, wait 10, 20, 30 levels of nothing happening with them, then reintroduce them with new and frightening members. I really think that'd make for some cool returning villains, and not just Vhazilok. What happened to Lughebu?

Actually, this reminds me of something PowerPoint does. I don't mean to say that if PowerPoint can do it, so can City of Heroes, but merely that I've seen a rig like this before.

Most PowerPoint shapes come with one ore more things you can tweak on them, with a "yellow square" on them that you can drag to change them. For instance, an arrow shape has two - the width of the arrow shaft and the part of the arrow that the pointed head takes place, while a smilie face shape comes with one square to control the angle of its mouth from smile to ambivalence to frown.

I don't know how applicable a system like this can be in our game system, but the idea of costume pieces that come with their own unique custom-tailored sliders at least has theoretical merit. Come to think of it, isn't that how Spore controlled its own pieces?

How do you figure? We keep confounding the developers by exploiting powers THAT THEY DESIGNED to create overpowered results they didn't anticipate, and you're trying to suggest that player-designed overpowered concepts would be obvious? I don't buy that. Sets that they make go through months and months of testing and still end up in the game with potential glaring problems.

Like the complexity of the Architect was a deterrent for people who wanted to make farm maps and crappy story arcs? The only thing that complexity is a deterrent to is oversight control from the development team to ensure we don't exploit the system horribly. You saw what happened to the Architect and what measures had to be taken. How can you still claim that with a straight face?

You are vastly underestimating the power of sufficient levels of defence and the ways in which it can fail. First of all, defence debuff resistance exists for a reason, and if the set doesn't have it (I haven't checked) it can be added. Secondly, high levels of defence with a bit of resistance can perform significantly well, oftentimes giving you even better survivability than high levels of resistance.

Furthermore, you're comparing a the theoretical fix to Granite Armour now, when it has both defence AND resistance in high values. It comes down to your personal preference for defence vs. resistance, but this is not a question of numbers design. It's a question of, again, preference. You state defence debuffs which, unless they come from the Soldiers of Rularuu, have to land in order to debuff you, which they won't. You're also talking about lucky streaks from AVs, completely ignoring UNLUCKY streaks from AVs that can save your hide. Ghost Widow or Nosferatu missing you on their Dark Regeneration makes a huge difference, as does Romulus' Healing Nictus missing you in that fight. Defence and resistance are not functionally interchangeable, but you can't point to one and claim it superior to the other.

It has been mentioned multiple times that, while the game will not be made harder with the expectation that people will be using Inventions, this doesn't mean that Inventions will not still be accounted for in balance calculations, especially when they create vast and unintended alternations in performance. As a point of fact, look at the history of Domination. It was intended to be used as a burst advantage, but people with enough set bonuses were able to make it perma, which caused the developers to shift performance around the AT to mitigate that fact. More specifically, to mitigate the problem of perma-Domination being seen as the norm.

Stone Armour is no different. If enough people see Granite Armour as the baseline performance for Stone Armour in general (which many do), then the solution that is to spread the protection around the rest of the set and ensure that specific Inventions builds do not vastly outperform everyone else because a loophole in design allowed them to ignore the drawbacks of the power.

To my understanding of Castle's post that you linked to, he didn't mind Shield Defence having more protection in some powers because it has overall less protection to go around, to be offset by the set's more offensive nature in Against All Odds and Shield Charge. I can't read his post as suggesting overpowered defences are good, because shield Defence is anything but overpowered.

Willpower is also much more situational. Optimal protection only exists with saturated Rise to the Challenge, and a lot of the set's protection still comes from hit points and regeneration, both of which are subject to much more sudden catastrophic failure than defence and resistance ever face. Furthermore, Willpower can still not maintain its absolute peak performance, because Strength of Will has an enforced downtime. And yet again, citing that you can build a Willpower Tanker who does more damage than Stone Armour is not an argument, because Willpower offers no intrinsic offensive benefit. You can say the exact same thing for every other Tanker primary because it's Stone Armour that debuffs its own offence, not the other sets that have greater offence as a set benefit.

Even relatively weak T9 powers like One With the Shield and Strength of Will still have enforced downtime. If you want a perma T9 that climbs on top of your existing shields, you WILL have to give up rather a lot. In fact, you'll have to go back to the old days, when Elude shut down your attacks completely.

It's not semantics and they didn't reduce offence to zero. You're thinking of Rage. Personal Forcefield does very much disable your offence at the source by applying an Only Affecting Self effect. Unlike the Rage Crash, you don't attack with very little damage but still full status effects. You cannot attack at all, because your attacks are prevented from firing to begin with. This is the exact same treatment Elude had back before I1 (the manual describes it as preventing you from attacking, and its name suggests that it's used to RUN AWAY), and it was changed because that's a stupid mechanic good only for gimmick powers in less "important" places in powerset progression. If you want your Granite Armour to say on perma and retain its current levels of survivability, then this is the kind of drawback you are looking at, and that just won't happen. Obviously.

You overestimate what it takes. Hasten not only overcomes the recharge debuff but actually gives you recharge faster than normal, JUST Swift removes the run speed debuff entirely and makes you run even faster (Rooted notwithstanding) and the damage buff is EASILY overcome by something as simple as being a Brute. A single attack from an enemy earns you, I believe, 5 points of Fury, equivalent to a 10% damage buff. Three enemies will put you on an even keel, and you can generally fight a lot more than that. And that -jump debuff gets handled with Teleport.

Again, the drawbacks in Granite Armour as they are right now are mainly annoying and do little to offset the armour's HUGE survivability increase. That's why nearly every Stone Tanker or Brute you see out there is perma-Granite. There's very little reason not to be, hence why it's bad design.

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Stone Armour in general is a set that has a lot of potential, but is so balanced by annoyance that far too many people just don't want to bother. And that's not good design for a set.

Oh, yeah, definitely, but that falls more under "proofreading" than "storyline." You can swap out the exact years things happened and unless it specifically contradicts an important event, it wouldn't constitute a change in the actual plot. Changing whether the man whose grave you're robbing died in 2005 or 2010 really doesn't make too much of a difference, so that's a change I'd make in a heartbeat.

Yeah, certain storylines just no longer make sense and need to be updated, or at the very least fudged. Angus McQueen's arc could easily be altered from being about stopping a Rikti breakthrough into being about preventing the Rikti from opening their "tenuous portal" up to full size and bringing forth an invasion fleet. The problem with his arc is that whoever wrote the Midnighter and Vanguard stories apparently forgot he existed, so we get basically a retread of his story with their content. Still, it could be adapted to fit.

Maria Jenkins is rather a lot harder. Her story relies on the fact that the Statesman wasn't actually present in the game. Players assumed he was just somewhere else in the city, but it turns out he was trapped in an alternate dimension. Now that he's in the city for all to see, her story makes no sense. This one would definitely need a re-write, or at the very least some kind of a fudge to explain why we're looking for the Statesman when we already know where he is. As Sppony says: "So I have to run away from the person that I'm chasing to find the elevator he used to escape from the sewer that he hasn't escaped form yet?"

What I am definitely AGAINST, however, is waking up one morning and seeing that the Hellions' long years of purse snatching have finally paid off and they've become a high-level demonic villain group while their old missions have been taken on by the Demonics, a group who look and act exactly like them but wear blue clothes and shoot blue fire, or that Malta have suddenly been exposed and broken up, removing Crimson and Indigo from the game who've moved on to other cases. These are the kind of large-scale storyline changes that do nothing but hurt the game.

*edit*
Speaking of change, why not abuse the level-centric timeline and do comebacks for old, defeated villains? For instance, Doc Vahzilok gets defeated 15-20, but why not have him make a comeback in the 40-50 range, using a new contingent of much more powerful, much less shambling zombies? You could easily borrow from games like Resident Evil and Parasite Eve to gather a good collection fast, hostile, deadly monsters for him to have stitched together and produced. Maybe even give him some cybernetics, too. No longer trying to just cure death, but also to improve on the human species, it'd be a cool storyline to have.

That's kind of why I will always advocate for generic ATs before more Epic ones. I don't so much mind the story mandate (even though I do) as I mind the enforced theme. Every time I ask for, say, an Assault/Defence AT, people tell me to go play a Kheldian, or go play a Soldier of Arachnos. Well, no. Suppose I want to play one with Fire powers? Or how about one with Electric powers? Or cold powers? Or how about one with Electric and Cold powers?

Epic ATs don't cut it, not as a framework. And I still want to see more generic ATs before I see more Epic ones.

I don't log out of the forums. There's nothing I hate more than having to log out and relog all the time. And it doesn't fix anything even when I do it, anyway.